Bangladesh Jamaat calls strike for Wednesday after court upholds leader's death penalty

Bangladesh's largest Islamist party has called a dawn-to-dusk national strike for Wednesday after the country's apex court Tuesday upheld a death penalty for its leader Mir Quasem Ali over war crimes during the country's war of independence in 1971.

A four-member bench of the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha Tuesday delivered the verdict, upholding the death penalty against the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islmai party's central executive committee member Ali, who is now behind the bars.

In a statement on Tuesday afternoon Jamaat made the announcement of the strike and urged all to observe it peacefully.

Jamaat also pleaded Ali's innocence and claimed that he had no links with war crimes in 1971.

The Supreme Court Tuesday upheld the punishment on eight counts, acquitted him on one, and changed the penalty in another. In June 2014 Ali was arrested from the offices of his newspaper Naya Diganta, a leading Bengali daily.

So far three Jamaat leaders -- Abdul Quader Molla, Muhammad Kamaruzzaman and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, have been executed. Apart from them, ex-Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Salauddin Quader Chowdhury was executed in November 2015.

Both BNP and Jamaat have dismissed the court as a government "show trial," saying it is a domestic set-up without the oversight or involvement of the United Nations. Muslim-majority Bangladesh was called East Pakistan until 1971. The government of Hasina said about 3 million people were killed in the war. Endit